Séamas O'Reilly: The blame for the housing crisis falls on the Government, not those fleeing war

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

It’s hard to gauge numbers from the recent anti-immigrant protests in Ireland, but it’s safe to say there’s more than there should be. Recently, a friend’s plea for tolerance on Facebook was jumped on by organised anti-immigrant pages, and soon he was inundated with replies of depressing vehemence and anger. Scrolling through the responses, a few clear patterns emerged. A lot of those most angry about immigrants were angry about other things too; the tyranny of LGBT rights and vaccine mandates being the two main prongs of the grievance trifecta in at least half of cases. Some redoubled their belief that refugees should, in fact must, be vanquished with violence. And there were also first-hand accounts from people local to refugee housing, seemingly ordinary folk who spoke of fears they had relating to the safety of their children. Fears expressed, however, using the borrowed rhetoric of committed far right activists who have parachuted into these communities — and the replies of every social media post going — to espouse their alarmist falsehoods.

This is the challenge for people and news organisations at this juncture. We have a chance to greet this with the response it demands. To offer facts and rebuttal to those genuinely looking for answers, yes, but to deny, oppose and reject those stirring the pot for their own nativist ends.

The problem with racist agitation — and let’s stop holding their hands for a second and call it what it is — is that it works. Historically. Emotionally. Psychologically. Exploiting one’s fear of others is just about the simplest tool in the political toolbox, possibly vying with “promising free stuff” for the top spot, and with the unbeatable bonus of being entirely free to those who wield it. The idea that Ireland has ever been free from racism is a childish fantasy — ask any Black person who has lived in Ireland and you will hear that story, or consider the ongoing ubiquity of anti-Mincéirí discrimination at every strata of Irish life — but seeing regular, organised groups in growing numbers, shouting obscenities at immigrants from the street, is worth addressing as an escalation.

There is, admittedly, something clumsy about the rallying cry “Irish people don’t get to be racist”. For one thing, no one gets to be racist, wherever they’re from. For another, this framing risks making it seem as if Irish people have not historically been racist many, many times before, and sometimes in large numbers.

But what is true is that Ireland’s own history of migration truly destroys any possible fig leaf of credibility any Irish nativist could claim. To say that migration has been a big part of Irish life is to undersell it a tad. A stranger to our shores — were they to survive our charming welcoming committees — would find it odd that so much of our culture is not just informed by, but specifically about the necessity and virtue of migration.

We have not merely accepted migration as a fact of life — its trials and tribulations form a central pillar of our national identity. We don’t merely acknowledge, but glorify, the hardiness and resilience of ancestors who struck out to make names for themselves, who suffered hardship and discrimination while building the railways of England, who escaped poverty, famine and disease to build the gleaming new cities of North America.

This has been true for so long that many of the chief architects of Irish independence — de Valera, Larkin and Connolly to name just three — were themselves born abroad as children of Irish immigrants (America, England and Scotland, respectively). James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw all lived outside Ireland for pretty much the entirety of their adult lives, and it would be a strange evening of Irish traditional music that didn’t feature lyrics about Liverpool, New York or Botany Bay. By 1890, 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad, but this is not solely a historical trend. As recently as 2015, the OECD reported that this number was at 17.5%, the largest number for any developed nation on Earth. We should hope and pray that their arrivals to the globe’s four corners don’t involve being screamed at by baying mobs chanting “burn them out”.

We have seen a decade of right-wing radicalisation across Europe and beyond; hatreds weaponised as false answers to very real problems people face, often problems that have little or nothing to do with migrants, or foreigners, or any minority you care to mention. In Ireland, this has meant the housing crisis, and rising homelessness, being retooled as a cudgel with which to beat those fleeing war and persecution. Why, they ask, should we house new entrants to our communities, and not our own people? No moralising is necessary to answer this one fairly definitively; the blame for the housing crisis falls, quite obviously, on the government, and not on those fleeing war and persecution overseas. The other, equally implacable, fact is that we are dutybound by international law to receive asylum seekers, to treat them with dignity and offer them our protection. It is not merely morally repugnant, but literally illegal, to ignore that duty. If we decide that we, and we alone, are exempt from obeying such laws, then we should stop to think how much legal, political and economic protection a small nation like Ireland has garnered from people willing to accept us in our times of need.

Above all, we must be clear-eyed and vigilant about the people behind these protests and what they actually want. If recent — and not-so-recent — history has taught us anything, it’s that there is nothing to learn about the far right’s beliefs that we don’t already know. Nothing we haven’t seen thousands of times throughout history in every place that ever held people in it. Nothing that isn’t rendered absurd when considered against the experiences of Irish people since time began. Nothing that doesn’t make a mockery of the warmth, decency and kindness that we claim to be our national character. Nothing that deserves anything other than direct rebuke and immediate opposition. And nothing that complacent, gullible, and well-meaning observers haven’t spent the entire span of human history learning the hard way.